5 ms·

You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphoric

• FeistySkink 21d ago
  Yeah, I never got the "don't think about the red hammer/apple" joke. Ok, done. Now what? For me thinking/imagining is an active process.
  • croisillon 21d ago
    and yet i believe it was Nietzsche who said something along the lines of "we don't think, we are thought" because for him (as for people without aphantasia) thoughts come whether you want it or not
• faeyanpiraat 21d ago
  Its a lot of undressing in one comment :)
• audidude 21d ago
  I didn't understand flashbacks in movies until about a decade ago when I realized I had it. What a corny and lazy story-telling-tool I'd tell myself.
  • christophilus 21d ago
    Oh. Interesting. I’m the same. Are those flashbacks actually a real thing people experience? I had also assumed it was just movie gimmicks.
    • audidude 21d ago
      They are real for some. I have Aphantasia but my wife has Hyperphantasia so we compare notes often. Each of us are at the edge of the spectrum.
      • stephen_g 21d ago
        Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?
    • stephen_g 21d ago
      I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?
    • nephihaha 21d ago
      Yes, unfortunately they are. I say unfortunately because they are often connected with trauma. When something goes very badly, those memories can go cycling around one's head. PTSD can do that too. Some people relive wars years after they happened. It's very real.
  • vidarh 21d ago
    I still find it a lazy story-telling tool, even in writing. It feels like an admission you can't find ways to weave the disclosure into the "present day" of the story in a natural way. Though, the notion that others can imagine these things if described to them makes it at least somewhat more understandable.
• myhf 21d ago
  > it opened my eyes to many things
• sixothree 21d ago
  > - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading. This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me feeling so much regret and sadness.
  • pm215 21d ago
    FWIW, I have always and still do enjoy reading fiction, and I never visualize what's happening in the book. I just read the words and enjoy the story...
  • Noaidi 21d ago
    Yeah, I hear this. Reading fiction was difficult for me because it was hard to distinguish and keep track of characters. I would find myself voicing the same voice for all the people in the story.
    • sixothree 21d ago
      It's important to keep track of characters when your final grade depends on it. Dialog was a bit difficult too because it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. What's interesting is that I remember enjoying reading when I was young. But that changed around 10 years I think.
  • vidarh 21d ago
    I love reading fiction despite my aphantasia (and writing it), but learning I had it made it make a lot more sense why I find sensory descriptions relatively uninteresting unless the prose itself is beautiful. I'll often skip descriptions of places or people because it gives me nothing.
  • mercutio2 20d ago
    For me, just different, not harder. But maybe the problem is you got some gray blobs, and I got nothing? If anything, my sense is that the absence of imagery makes book reading much easier for me. At least for plot and abstractions. I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero. I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.
• pjerem 21d ago
  I was also shocked and a few minutes after i completely forgot. It's like, "ok, I can't miss something I've never had". And I was hugely comforted in this position when I learnt that "normal" people hear a fucking real voice in their head. I hear nothing and that's totally fine :D
  • deleted 21d ago
    [deleted]
• tpoacher 21d ago
  Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have. And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46. The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost back in 1999, but otherwise vast areas of your life are as if they've been smeared by a blur filter. Let alone trying to explain it to a spouse who mistakes it for lack of interest / commitment.
  • Noaidi 21d ago
    Aphant and SDAM are linked with many neurological disorders. I have Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type and OCD. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9614338/
  • ajkjk 21d ago
    I normally have no autobiographical memory, but once I went to a weeklong meditation retreat and around the second day it sorta all showed up at once. Anecdotal but perhaps interesting.
  • xerox13ster 21d ago
    Anecdotally, ADHD has nothing to do with this. Or rather, it has as much to do with aphantasia as aphantasia has to do with how prolific a reader someone is. My ADHD used to make me constantly daydream and disappear mentally into incredibly vibrant internal worlds and it regularly impacted my ability to focus on schoolwork because I would draw flipbooks of what I was seeing. I can sharply visualise autobiographical memories from when I was 6 months old of me crawling on the dining room floor and have had aunts and uncles confirm the shape and color of the chairs around the dining table on my left, the curling of the woodwork on the china cabinet to my right, the paisley pattern of the runner rug leading from the dining room to the den that I just crawled onto and can still feel the fibers on my knees. I left that house to never return when I was a year and a half old, and never saw pictures of it either. On the other hand, I also have dissociative amnesia from everything that happened after that 1.5 year mark, so a lot of 5-10 is a huge bubbling black cauldron that occasionally burps out an autobiographical memory of some traumatic shit, or some mundane memory tangentially connected to something traumatic. This to say, I would be more willing to accept a connection between aphantasia and SDAM, since you can't, with the same fidelity, reencode memories you can't visually recall, than I would be to accept that ADHD has anything to do with aphantasia at all, from my position on the other end of the mental visualization/autobiographical recall spectrum.
• feverzsj 21d ago
  Yeah, most people can do it, but the image is far from photo or video. They are mostly vague and lack lots of details. So, it's really not much difference.
  • graeme 21d ago
    From what people report some can see a full picture.
    • feverzsj 21d ago
      Photographic memory is very rare.
      • NoGravitas 21d ago
        There is a fairly wide spectrum short of photographic memory, though. I can see a fair bit of detail in mental imagery, but only if I trade off other things like the size of the area I'm imagining, or how long I can hold it in my mind.
• perrygeo 21d ago
  I thought "count sheep" just meant "please just go the f*k to sleep, kid". Literally counting sheep was too absurd. At the risk of sounding obvious, there are no sheep. No amount of trying to conjure pictures of sheep would work. I was very confused by this as a kid. Later in life, the realization moment came when I was watching a TV show, a police procedural where the witnesses described the suspect. Police were able to use the descriptions to make an accurate sketch. "Yeah right, like anyone could recall those details". I was convinced it was a Hollywood trick. My friends looked at me funny and proceeded to describe the faces, clothing, etc. of off-screen characters with stunning accuracy. That's when I learned other people can recall (or even conjure) visual images and read them like photographs.
  • dooglius 21d ago
    I thought the point of counting sheep was to do something boring and repetitive that puts your brain into a relaxed state
    • perrygeo 21d ago
      Visualizing a sheep is not something I can even do once. Let alone repetitively until it gets boring. Being asked to visualize is quite frustrating and confusing - especially to a little kid not sure exactly what he's supposed to be "seeing". Hardly relaxing.
      • dooglius 20d ago
        I don't think you actually had to visualize the sheep for it to work, I never thought of that as being explicitly required
        • perrygeo 15d ago
          That's just "counting". But for many people (the vast majority of humans), they can and do easily visualize sheep as they count them.
• davidsojevic 21d ago
  I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier. I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!" When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
  • theshrike79 19d ago
    I remember the massive hubbub about the Mortal Engines movie specifically. The only thing I remembered about the main character was that she had a scar on her face. Fans were nitpicking every single strand of hair and I was like "You guys remember that, do you make notes when reading or what?". Apparently people visualize books so hard that they "see" the characters and remember them.